-=> andrew clarke wrote to Ben Ritchey <=-

 ac> A lot of the magic of shell scripts is in calling the right UNIX
 ac> program for the task, and this doesn't necessarily translate well from
 ac> DOS. Also, error handling is fairly different.

Yes, knowing your utilities is handy, and reading the man pages so you can get
the exact behaviour you require.  Unix has a wider choice than Windows by
default, though there are now Windows ports of many utilities, which means you
can incorporate more of that functionality into batch files.

 ac> As well as what others have mentioned, you might want to look at some
 ac> of the system shell scripts included with your system, notably the
 ac> /etc/rc* scripts in BSD and Linux.

 ac> If you get stuck on a particular problem you can ask here.

I learned by reading a lot of shell scripts and hacking them. :)


... Now there's a beetle in my soup. Sorry, sir, we're out of flies today.
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